The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas about U.S. Parties – ERRATUM

Abstract

1Results do not change when controlling for demographics. See Figure S1 in Supplementary Material. 2Unfortunately, we cannot test this explanation directly. Negative D-scores could of course be the result of strong mental associations between the Republican Party and blacks (rather than whites) while not having a strong schema about the Democratic Party. Substantively, that would be “negative projection,” or imposing the racial outgroup identity onto the out-party. We suspect this explanation is less plausible, especially in the light of findings from Study 3 demonstrating that explicit schemas of the Republican Party as white are uniform in the sample. 3We worried that respondents, especially whites, might underreport the association of the Democratic Party with blacks due to social desirability concerns. If so, the variation of schemas in the population would be underestimated, with more respondents reporting that both parties were white. Underestimating this variance, in turn, would lead to smaller and less significant associations between schemas and other variables of interest. This suggests that our test is a conservative one. 3This change in partisan affect informed by race–party schemas can ultimately lead to sorting. The possibility of white Americans defecting from the Democrats in response to its increasing racial liberalism and the growing share of nonwhites in the party has been shown in the literature before (Hajnal and Rivera 2014; Valentino and Sears 2005; Zingher 2018). Our findings suggest that this process may continue in the foreseeable future.